grow up without a father's guidance and example, injured because they were de- nied a boy's life on the ranch. "If he wants a see the kids why can't he just come into town?" Suzzy said to her mother on the phone after the split. Her complaining voice rose, dipped. "You know I put in years on that ranch, and nothin really worked right. Half the time there wasn't water and when there was water it was nasty. We couldn't get in or out in the winter. No telephone, no elec- tricity, no neighbors, his mother always naggin, and the work! He wore me down. 'Do this, do that,' bullyin ways. Keep that old house clean? Couldn't be done. He could a sold the place fifty times over and lived decent if he got a job like a nor- mal human bein, but would he? No. I wouldn't relive those years for nothin." Once she had made up her mind to leave, her own stubbornness emerged. But Gil- bert refused to agree to a divorce and the separation and enmity dragged on. In town she got a cash-register job at the Big Billy supermarket and as soon as the two boys were old enough to run er- rands and deliver papers she made them get after-school and weekend jobs as well. She wanted to show them there were bet- ter things than cows and debt. The Big Billy job was no good. Not only was the pay low but she disliked having to repeat "Have a nice day" to people who deserved to be ridden bare- back by the Devil wearing can openers for spurs, and one day she quit to take a job as a filing clerk in the county trea- surer's office. It gravelled Gilbert that she handled his property-tax and vehicle- registration papers. She wore him down on the divorce and he gave up after a fight in town in her new house. She had bought an old brick mansion with big trees in the yard and an ornamental iron fence around it. In the eighteen-eighties the house had belonged to a Chicago merchant who used it two or three times a year to oversee his ranch investments. Gilbert did not understand how she could afford this house. They had argued, then screamed. Gilbert stood with his legs apart and his arms hanging loose. Another man would have recog- nized this as a bad sign but she could not stop blaming him, and he, goaded to vio- lence, slapped her a good one and she came at him and yanked out a clump of his hair in the front where it would show, 130 THE NEW YORKER., AUGUST 18 & 25, 2003 THE 5ECOND CHILD You see I, too, was second in order. Two. Before you arrived for a ti e I cried nightly at the fattening, spelling the end of our tight, well-tended trio. The carefully scheduled bliss of bath and bed-luxurious brace of both to read a single book, darting between us, her drinking-aIl-in, wee weighty look, her finger gesture toward some new developmental toy or crystal bit of babble our post-crib nightcap, rehashed joy. . . . Now no rehash, littler miss, of your darting, airy imitation of her searing kiss: down babyhood's brief corridor you disappear behind her, the master dancer, your tutor in body and mind, ran to the back of the house, and called the sherif( When the law came she ac- cused Gilbert of assault, showing the red mark on her cheek as proof. "What about this?" shouted GiJbert, pointing to his bleeding scalp, but Sher- iff Brant Smich, his second cousin, ig- nored him. When the divorce finalJycame through it was settled that if he wanted the boys to help out on the ranch for a weekend he would have to drive in and fetch them and he would have to pay them for their labor. He had paid practi- calJy nothing for child support during the long separation, she said, it was the least he could do. He protested, said he had cancelled checks to prove he had certaiilly paid adequate if not luxurious support. "Take it to court,>> she said, "you think you been treated so bad." Neither of the boys came willingly to the ranch. They appeared only in times of crisis after Gilbert telephoned Suzzy, demanding their help-spring brand- ing, fence work. They let themselves be dragged out for a weekend then, sulky and grudging. They sassed their grand- mother and whispered and snickered when they saw cows bulling. A day's work was not in them. They wanted only to ride the horses. It was clear to Gilbert that at his death they would sell the place as fast as they could. One day someone would find his stiff corpse out in the pas- ture, the wire cutters in his hand, or they would find him fallen in the muddy irri- gation ditch, as he had found his own fa- ther. He would never be able to pass on to them how he felt about the land. His allegiance to the place was not much of a secret, for even outsiders per- ceived his scalding passion for the ranch. His possessive gaze fell on the pale teeth of distant mountains, on the gullies and washes, the long draw shedding Indian scrapers and arrowheads. His feeling for the ranch was the strongest emotion that had ever moved him, a strangling love tat- tooed on his heart. It was his. It was as if he had drunk from some magic goblet full of the elixir of ownership. And although the margins of Bull Jump Creek had been trampled bare and muddy by generations of cows, although there were oilly one or two places along it still flushed with green willow, the destruction had happened so gradually that he had not noticed, for he thought of the ranch as timeless and un- changing in its beauty. It needed only young men to put it right. So his thoughts